Despots, Diadems, and Diadochoi: Josephus and Flavian Politics (original) (raw)
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In the tradition of Schmitt and Agamben’s “political theology”, anthropologists David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins have traced the concept of political power and sovereignty to an initially religious impulse - an attempt to channel the raw violent potential of humans and, as importantly, nature into a ceremonial vehicle. They differentiate between two models of ancient sovereignty - divine kings (whose divine power is absolute and unrestrained) and sacred kings (who embody power in order to contain it). In these terms - insofar as the sovereign is conceptualized as the one who imposes the state of exception, rather than the sacrifice on whom it is imposed - political thought in the Western tradition embedded in the tradition of divine kingship. Robert Graves, following James Frazer, proposed an alternate lineage of sacred kingship at the earliest origins of the Western tradition in the myth of a dying and resurrecting king, ultimately subordinate to the true source of divine power, the Goddess of life, who is slain and replaced by his double. This sacrificial ritual, unlike current binary models of sovereignty, is mediated by a third term which operationalizes a second binary, splitting that in which the "sovereign" always arises as the dominant term against itself. Though its historicity has been challenged, I argue that this model taken as a formal hypothetical presents a useful paradigm for demonstrating the contingency of the form of the paradox of sovereignty asserted by Schmitt, Agamben, etc., and reading it in relation to the structure of binary contradiction and dialectic - manifest distinctly in the structure of double kingship and in the opposition of sovereign and homo sacer - as well as the absent term of mediation.